


your heart (a weapon the size of your fist)

by seryphsystem (Slie)



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Everyone Needs Therapy, Gen, Low Chaos Corvo Attano, healthy management of stress and ptsd ft. corvo "too old for this shit" attano, muse was violently murdered by the daud light novel smh
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-13
Updated: 2018-03-13
Packaged: 2019-03-30 18:10:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13957158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slie/pseuds/seryphsystem
Summary: He is more than just a black-eyed boy, but Delilah is more than just an Empress.(Daud dies at the Albarca Baths, and the Outsider decides to do something else.)





	your heart (a weapon the size of your fist)

Corvo wakes to silence, his cabin gone eerie and strange in the predawn light. Even the bright paint of Samuel's miniature boat, rescued from the safe room, seems grey on grey from where its been tucked neatly into a shelf. It nearly blends in with the rest of the room, all the color drained from a cabin already nearly colorless.  
  
The blankets have gone chill overnight, and he grimaces as he sweeps them off to rest his boots on the bare floor. It's taken all this time on the way over from Dunwall for him to get used to sleeping with the minimum of amenities Meagan can provide. The roughness of the blankets catch at his skin when he smooths them out, the mattress is hard and unforgiving against his back, and no matter how he arranges himself under coat and sheet it seems that Corvo can never stay warm.  
  
He sleeps well nonetheless. Old age is exhausting, he thinks uncharitably, and so is relearning the world without a Mark.  
  
Shaking off his thoughts, he finds himself staring blankly at his empty desk, his empty shelves.

He should find things to put in them. Emily complains when he leaves things bare, always teasing him until he leaves "proof" that he can think of something other than work. The corners of his mouth pull up a bit at the memory. She grows brighter and more brilliant with every passing day.  
  
He finally tugs at the door handle, ready to go.  
  
It doesn't turn.  
  
...Corvo squints at the door, brows lowering in irritation. He looks to the left. To the right. Nothing there. Jiggles the handle again, to no avail.  
  
A breeze slips through his clothes as though they’re made of the thinnest Tyvian silk, leaving him shivering. Behind him the back wall is gone, pulled open to bare black stone and tattered pennants tearing in the wind.

A dream?

But he remembers this endless cold. The way things twist in it, the way (he’s sure) if he turned the faucet in the sink that water would start to flow upwards.

He hasn’t seen the Outsider in fifteen years, but once he steps out he can feel that great gaze watching. He hasn’t seen the Void in just as long but he knows that’s where he is too.

It’s so dark. The vast expanse looks like Dunwall’s skies in the worst of its raging storms, and did the wind always pull at him this hard?

No use wondering.

“Where are you? You might as well show yourself.”

No one comes. He keeps his steps slow and careful against the rocks, these smooth slabs jutting out of a dreaming mockery of the Dreadful Wale. Rain would turn these slick and lethal in a true storm, the kind of stone no sane man would test his boots against for fear of falling to his death.

Corvo makes no claims to sanity. Sane men don’t escape Coldridge.

There’s a doorway set in the rock at the top of a slope, an obvious meeting point. Corvo makes a face at nothing in particular as he works his way up, legs protesting the uphill climb so soon after waking.

The unseen presence nudges him forward when he pauses before the gate. When he finally gives in and takes a step it coalesces in a swirl of mist and stone- not forming the Outsider midair as he had always been before, but standing framed by metal and uncompromising stone.

It makes him look small. Caged in by his own domain.

"Corvo, old friend, do I even have to say it?" The Outsider spreads his hands, and Corvo notices how they tremble. "You've lost another Empress."

The god vanishes under his scrutiny, reappearing a few feet to the side as though that would put an end to Corvo's eyes on his.

"Delilah was born a pawn, but now she's got the throne." His voice turns almost sly. "Fifteen years ago, the assassin Daud could have warned you about her if you'd bothered to ask. But I suppose you were both too busy for questions."

Something about this feels... wrong. The Outsider's voice, layered with something Corvo doesn't recognize, trying too hard to seem callous and unaffected. The light shaking and shivering around the edges of his body. The way the once immovable deity can't sit still, fingers trembling as he paces instead of floating off the ground. The way his brow creases as he speaks where once it had stayed smooth and inhumanly calm.

The Void itself, darker and colder than it has ever been before.

What has Delilah done?

"Times have changed, Corvo," the Outsider says, and it's almost an acknowledgement of his racing thoughts. "You haven't been watching the dark corners of the world. Maybe living in a palace has made you soft."

Corvo narrows his eyes at him. If he didn't know better, he'd say the Outsider was smirking at his reaction.

"What happens when you push a man farther than he ever thought he could go? Does he break? And what happens when he tries to go home?" The Outsider leans forward with black on black eyes locked on Corvo's own, lips tilting down. "Maybe you'll finally learn what it feels like to kill an Empress, dear Corvo. Daud could have told you about that too."

That is absolutely pushing the limits of what Corvo is willing to put up with, but the Outsider vanishes again before he can say a word.

His bad feeling is only growing. Something here is very, very wrong.

 _Come find me,_ the Outsider doesn’t say, but this time he doesn’t have to. Corvo sets off alone across the sharp edges of this new Void, bones aching in the all-encompassing cold.

He hasn’t forgotten the scenes his first trip to the Void showed him, but fifteen years dulled the pain of them. Seeing Emily’s statue standing proud and afraid makes something in his chest crack wide open, ugly and bleeding. He has felt this before.

_YOU CANNOT SAVE HER YOU CANNOT SAVE HER YOU CANNOT SAVE HER YOU CANNOT SAVE HER_

“I’m going to save my daughter,” he tells the Outsider (who is always watching), “and win back her throne.”

There’s no reply, but he didn’t need one. Corvo rests his forehead against Emily’s for one long and painful breath, hand on her cheek- and lets her go.

Seeing Delilah and her pawns on the next island seems worth hardly anything in comparison. He can’t even muster up surprise when the Outsider appears next to her. (Some part of his mind and his heart are still with Emily, breaking.)

“There’s no one quite like Delilah,” the Outsider says. Corvo does his best to focus. “I watched her pull herself up from blood and filth, until she was in a position to steal from the wisest scholars in the Empire.”

The god turns to the figures around her, one hand trailing absently along the face of a hooded and bandaged woman leaning over the false Empress’s shoulder. “Survival and ambition, art and magic, with a cunning that makes fawning sycophants of those around her. All of it leading to what you saw at Dunwall Tower.”

Corvo does his best to memorize who makes up the tableau before him, but there isn’t much to go on. Lucas Abele, of course, and Delilah- but the hooded woman could be anyone, and he doesn’t recognize the dark-skinned, finely dressed noblewoman caught eyeing Delilah in something like adoration.

“Delilah is playing the long game,” the Outsider says. “She took all the abuse the world could deal out, and now she has a crown.” In any other man Corvo would call that furrowed brow something like pain or aggravation- and his thoughts are cut off as the Outsider leans too far into his personal space, eyes dark and face shadowed like a man possessed.

“But I’ll let you in on a secret, Corvo: she’s got her eyes set on a much bigger prize.”

He vanishes again, of course. Corvo breathes in the cold and wills his hands to stop shaking when he doesn’t immediately wake up.

There’s still more to do, then.

 

\---

 

Far too much time passes before another island pulls into view. This one is large and crumbling, its top hidden from sight by twisted branches and distorted stone. Shards of rock tremble above each slab, as though frozen in the middle of an explosion from some unknown power.

Corvo is hesitant to step foot on it. There’s something so very wrong about this place, something that makes his shoulders tense and the wary animal part of him shudder in fear. But there’s no other way forward. Statue after statue line the path ahead of him, made of the same stone as Emily. (A clue?)

It’s not a surprise when the Outsider meets him at the bottom of the slope, where numberless robed figures have their backs turned to the two of them.

"There are many islands in the Void,” he says as a greeting, hardly glancing at the worn faces that surround them. “But this one is special, Corvo. Four thousand years ago they brought a boy here from the streets, washed him and changed his clothes and put expensive rings on his hands."

The Outsider looks down then, examining bare fingers and black nails. Corvo has a bad feeling about where this is going.

“Then they cut his throat. The blood ran out, and he became a god.” The god looks back up, black eyes unreadable as the day they met. “This is the place where my life ended and where it began again.”

Tucking his hands behind his back, the Outsider looks more human than he has ever been.

“It's where they made me."

He disappears like he's escaping and doesn't come back. Corvo glances around for him among the statues, but there's no one there.

“Outsider?” he calls. There’s no answer.

Huffing, Corvo resigns himself to climbing through the apparently endless field of stone figures, all their eyes trained on a mysterious something out of reach. This is getting very, very old. Much like him. He’s too old for this.

The mysterious thing every statue is staring at turns out to be an altar at the top of the island, uncomfortable and forbidding. There’s a frozen cultist with an odd knife raised to stab someone that isn’t there, and isn’t that an ominous thought. But he doesn’t spare much time for imagining the Outsider’s birth- or death, because. Because-

Placed on the altar is a familiar whalebone sword.

It isn't whalebone anymore. Parts of the blade are chipped and broken, and something dry and white and bound with wire fills the gaps and cracks, and there's a space in the center of the sword- knife?- that echoes the one raised above it in a frozen cultist's hands. For all that Corvo is used to unpleasant truths, something in him can’t help but cringe back at the implications.

_The heart of a living thing, molded by my hands._

But Corvo Attano did not come this far by ignoring terrible implications.

"Outsider," he says again. "What is this?"

No answer comes, and he resigns himself to picking up the cursed thing. The stone steps feel unreal beneath his feet and he half expects the altar to give way to his questing hands. Something about this island feels unrealized, hollow, like a painting left half-done or a ship half-built.

The hilt of Daud's sword is very real and very warm. Too warm; the whaleskin wrapping is skin-hot, feverish, and he almost expects to feel someone's racing pulse.

But there is no pulse. Because-

"Daud died quietly, locked in a torturer's chair in a cage that would better serve for hounds."

Corvo whirls around to face the black-eyed god, startled, heart in his throat.

"Does that make you happy, Corvo? Or are you afraid, knowing the man who caused all your nightmares could be taken down so easily?" The Outsider's face is almost inscrutable, standing so close that Corvo can't help but expect some kind of breath or warmth. But there is none, and he vanishes in a whirl of shadow and stone before Corvo can reach out to touch.

His last words come from the altar, unseen and ominous.

"Daud was kept in a place the Void couldn't reach, unable to use his Mark. But death has a way of getting around those sort of things."

When minutes pass and nothing happens, Corvo sighs. The nearest island is too far to jump, and he knows how this dance goes. For all his dramatics, the Outsider had given away a rather blatant hint at what he's supposed to do. Thinking through mysteries, sorting through just what had happened to the Outsider in the present and the past- all that would have to wait for a better time.

He shifts the Daud-knife to his left hand, contemplative, and feels a nebulous _something_ open up. He can feel magic just a little different from his own, the ragged edge of a mind he once tried to possess.

 _Nice try, Corvo,_ memory tells him. _But inside my mind is the last place you want to be._

Corvo takes a long breath, clenches his hand, and Blinks away.

 

\---

 

The difference between Corvo’s Mark and Daud’s knife become quickly and unfortunately apparent within the first five minutes, when Corvo decides to try a blast of Void-touched wind and instead gets the breath knocked out of him.

Doubled over and choking, it takes a moment for him to notice the questioning nudge at the back of his mind. He directs his scowl at the knife and the presence doesn’t- quite- flinch back.

 _Transversal,_ Daud’s rough voice whispers somewhere beyond sound. _Hold time, and choose your mark._

Before Corvo can frown harder at the unfortunate wording it speaks again, tired and quiet. _When- the Knife? When he shared his Mark, he trained them for weeks on end before letting them fight._

In other words, Corvo mentally translates, figure out what you can do and practice before you get yourself killed.

He flexes his fingers around the grip of the knife, thoughtful. He can Blink just fine though, so-

A flash of offended negation interrupts his thoughts. This time, though, Daud doesn’t deign to explain himself and Corvo is left furrowing his brows in irritation.

But Jessamine’s Heart was just as cryptic, so perhaps it’s just a problem with the dead. He does his best not to linger on that thought. Comparing Jess and Daud is like asking Wyman’s gender: awkward, painful, and an undertaking best left unfinished.

So there’s something about Daud’s Blink- Transversal? -that is different than his own, something he hasn’t grasped in his handful of attempts since picking up the knife. But it’s hard enough to recall the details of a fight fifteen years ago, much less one where he was still half-poisoned and moving through little more than adrenaline and desperation.

Something in the Daud-knife shifts at that, uncomfortable and awed. Corvo makes an executive decision to ignore it.

He tries a few testing Blinks across the rocks, taking the time to examine how it feels now that he’s not just focused on getting to another island. There’s an extra catch in the magic somehow, a tiny sense of _something else_ that he hadn’t really paid attention to.

 _Hold time,_ the knife said. That’s a strange phrase to use-

And then Corvo learns what it means the hard way when he misjudges a Blink and falls off a very high rock.

He inhales and the world stops moving. His heart is hammering and the world isn’t moving, he isn’t falling. He isn’t falling-!

 _Worse than my novices,_ Daud’s voice groans, and he’s back on solid ground with the knife radiating exasperation. But he was just frozen in midair, thank you, Corvo is being perfectly reasonable in taking an extra minute to catch his breath here.

There’s a sense-memory pressing at him, green light and a blade shoved in Jessamine’s chest- but no. Now is not the time. This is not a safe place. He can’t afford to think about that here. The memory presses, but he presses on.

The knife’s humor from a moment ago is gone, replaced by a deep-seated guilt and tiredness. Corvo ignores that too.

Now that he knows what Daud’s Transversal does, it doesn’t take long to get the hang of it. He can tell that it’ll take time for the variations to become truly natural- being able to hang in midair opens up an entirely new range of movement that he’ll have to keep in mind- but the basics are not all that different from his own abilities, as he thought.

He reserves the right to be a little grumpy about losing his wind ability. That one was convenient.

There’s a hesitant pull on what’s left of the knife’s magic, anxiety tugging at Corvo’s chest. He raises an eyebrow at it.

The blade seems to take that as permission and glows green, tethering to a nearby shard of rock with a lurching _pull_ that almost knocks Corvo over with the force of it. The magic cuts off almost instantly as he staggers, Daud’s mind curling in on itself as he finds his feet again. Anxiety and remorse flare as quickly as they fade, leaving him nonplussed.

...It seems the assassin has his own problems.

But the tether has potential to be useful, so Corvo makes a note of it and decides to move on. There’s little more to do here, and he’s long grown tired of the wind and the infinite cold of this darker Void.

It’s not just his body that’s starting to suffer from the strain. He needs time to let his mind rest, time to let his heart sort through all of this before he moves in error and does something he’d regret. Corvo has seen what happens to men who let themselves break. It isn’t pretty.

He’s seen what happens to men who don’t think before raising their blade, and though that’s more common it’s still a problem he doesn’t want to have.

But this isn’t the place to ruminate.

Corvo walks.


End file.
